Captured by the APEX telescope, it's the most detailed image of our galaxy ever captured from the Southern hemisphere.

On Wednesday, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) unveiled a stunning new image of the Milky Way’s galactic plane taken by the APEX telescope in Chile’s Atacama Desert.

A composite of more than 700 observations captured by the telescope, it’s the most detailed image ever created of our galaxy from the Southern hemisphere, and the first time that the southern Milky Way has been shown at the submillimeter wavelengths between infrared light and radio waves:

ESO/APEX/ATLASGAL CONSORTIUM/NASA/GLIMPSE CONSORTIUM/ESA/PLANCK

Submillimeter telescopes are useful for observing very cold and dusty regions of the universe, such as the gas clumps floating throughout our galaxy from which new stars are born. These star-forming regions are “often dark and obscured due to the dust,” the ESO stated, but they “shine brightly in the millimeter and submillimeter part of the spectrum.”

Called the APEX Telescope Large Area Survey of the Galaxy (ATLASGAL), the mapping of the Milky Way was conducted between July 2007 and November 2010.

“ATLASGAL has allowed us to have a new and transformational look at the dense interstellar medium of our own galaxy, the Milky Way,” astronomer Leonardo Testi said in a statement. “The new release of the full survey opens up the possibility to mine this marvelous dataset for new discoveries.”